Mud Again

I knew from the walk down this morning that the walk back in this afternoon was going to be bad, and it was considerably worse than I expected. Easy day at the museum, pulling plastic anchors, patching and repairing, running a few errands. When Mark and Charlotte got back from Cincinnati, just before four, I left; stopped at Kroger for whiskey and a few things, but I wanted a fairly light pack for what I knew was going to be a slog. Frost coming out of the ground, and already the top inch was thawed. Slipped and nearly fell a couple of times, every step was slick, and I took great care. My boots acquired quite the layer of mud. Cleaned off, as best I could, but still left a trail from the back door to the chair where I change shoes. Straight into an extra pair of socks and house slippers. No way I'm going outside until Sunday, when I need to haul wood. I brought a couple of books home, about landscape painting, just to see if I wanted to give a talk on that. "Wyeth and Carter: The American Landscape". I can see the other side of the hollow now, so I get my big military binoculars, and use them, occasionally, to sweep the other slope. Sometimes I turn my chair around, rest the binoculars on my knees, and watch a related sequence of events for a long time. It's what I imagine television is like. What interested me, late this afternoon, was the way squirrels could recover a specific acorn. How do they remember where they buried it? I was looking for a particular book this evening, Bacon's essays, and I remembered exactly what the book looked like, brown, faux beading on the spine, the title in an old-style type; I couldn't find it. If it came down to me and a squirrel, I'd put my money on the squirrel. Later still, I was in a fit about something. I'd gone outside to pee, and I was mumbling to myself, my various failures; what stopped me cold, was that everything was frozen. Time. How do you factor that? Lost electricity but still had phone service so I called the power company and they said that a repair truck was heading out my way, they already knew of the outage. Took them several hours, which usually means a downed power pole. Even with the overcast and rain there was enough light to read, so I spent most of the day reading "The Luneburg Variation" a novel about chess and morality, a couple of issues of The New Yorker and several copies of The London Review Of Books. I've been eating peanut butter on corn pone, which I had never done before, and it's quite good. A day like this, even canned chili is pretty good. In the afternoon the clouds race off and there's a little sun to end the day, which bodes well for hauling wood tomorrow. On my breaks I'll start reading about landscape painting. I do eventually have to go outside, to dump the dishpan (the drain has been frozen for a week) and my piss-pot, and there's a fecund organic smell from the rotting leaf-litter. On the weekends, during the day, I drink very strong black tea with a little cream and sugar, and I keep finger food around, trail mix and jerky, several different olives, gherkins, cheese, saltine crackers. I just graze, and then it's finally five in the afternoon somewhere, I have a drink and consider my position. It's not idle boast to say I like who I am, the place where I find myself, my particular stool at the bar. It's a fine line, between fantasy and fact, but I earn a living and operate in the world of commerce. I hate myself for that, actually. The way I can operate in the world. Go figure.